COVID-19 SPECIAL

Coronavirus: Alone together in an Edward Hopper painting

"We are all Edward Hopper paintings now", reads a tweet that has garnered some 220,000 likes.

It is easy to see how Hopper has become the artist of the Covid-19 outbreak. With safe distancing measures, people sitting indoors by windows overlooking the emptied streets of the outside world has become a new normal.

In works like Automat (1927), Nighthawks (1942) and Morning Sun (1952), Hopper's subjects seem to mirror people today, with the exception of a smartphone in their hands.

Many have linked his works to the loneliness of modernity, and more recently, the digital age.

Because of warnings about the link between social media platforms and mental health, I have been reluctant to embrace the digital world.

But recently, with the new rules on safe distancing, I've found myself having meals in my room while talking to a propped-up phone. Lunch on Good Friday was spent checking in on friends and family across the country who are not part of the same household, over a WhatsApp video call.

But this is a new digital me.

While I was away at university, Instagram gave me homesickness even though I knew I was happy to be where I was. To deal with it, I frequently went through periods of deleting social media apps from my phone. Back then, it was common for my average daily screen time to be under an hour.

Even though my screen time has quadrupled since I started work, I tried to restrict my time on these platforms to be what writer and computer scientist Cal Newport calls a "digital minimalist".

The term refers to someone who is, among other things, able to hold conversations without looking at his phone and enjoy time spent with family and friends without the urge to document the experience.

Last Thursday, we saw how dangerous digital platforms can be. The Ministry of Education announced that all teachers would stop using Zoom for their home-based teaching after hackers hijacked the streaming of a lesson to show obscene pictures to some students.

It served as a timely reminder that we must continue to be vigilant in the digital world by installing security, requiring secure log-ins to chats and ensuring that conference links are not shared beyond the group.

However, as the coronavirus reached Singapore, it became unhealthy and unsafe to socialise in person, and the digital world became unavoidable.

I began to worry since, as The Sunday Times reported last week, mental health issues are the hidden crisis of pandemics. These are uncertain times, and they are coupled with enforced social isolation.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted these issues as he announced the circuit breaker measures on April 3. "Safe distancing is also hard for a psychological and emotional reason: It goes very much against our human instincts. It is in our nature to want to socialise, to be close to those we are talking to, to take comfort in the warmth and company of friends and family," he said.

But while we wait until we can be close to those we are talking to, taking to the digital world has become the only way we can meet our desire for emotional intimacy beyond our households.

No longer is my Instagram feed covered with posts telling me where to dine and holiday. Instead, these posts have been replaced by people engaging others - be it in handstand shirt challenges, dancing, cooking or cheering for front-line workers together.

Even for those who miss being connected to others as part of a crowd at a live concert, the Global Citizen charity has organised the Together At Home concert series with the World Health Organisation, to benefit the organisation's Covid-19 fund.

One of the concerts was a performance in which EGOT - Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony - award winner John Legend performed live on Instagram in his home with his wife, model Chrissy Teigen, sitting on the piano, wearing a towel.

Locally, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Singapore Chinese Orchestra have been offering fresh as well as archival content on their Facebook and YouTube channels to engage audiences.

Video-conferencing apps offer more meaningful face-to-face interactions, and their popularity has increased. Last month, Microsoft, which runs Skype, said the app's usage had gone up 70 per cent from February while its Teams app more than doubled the 20 million daily active users it reported last November.

A more informal app, Houseparty, where users can video call one another while playing games on the app, has also become popular here.

I succumbed to peer pressure and downloaded the app last week, and found the hour or two spent catching up with friends to be the highlight of my day.

Returning to Hopper, perhaps the parallels between our experience of looking into the diner in Nighthawks through unobstructed glass windows, and our experience of looking into other people's lives through the glass of our phones, need not purely be a lonely thing.

After all, the experience of loneliness is something we all share, and it can remind us how much we need one another to navigate the new normal in this pandemic.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Sunday Times on April 12, 2020, with the headline Coronavirus: Alone together in an Edward Hopper painting. Subscribe